The Saturn V (pronounced "Saturn Five") was a multistage liquid-fuel expendablerocket used by NASA for Apollo and Skylab missions between 1967 and 1972. In total NASA launched twelve Saturn V rockets, plus one derived Saturn INT-21, with no loss of payload. It remains the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status, in terms of height, mass and payload capacity. The Soviet Energia, which flew two test missions in the late 1980s before being cancelled, had slightly more takeoff thrust.
Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was a German rocket scientist and one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. Von Braun is well known as the leader of what has been called the “rocket team” which developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his rocket team were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun worked with the U.S. Army in the development of ballistic missiles. At Fort Bliss, they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile. In 1960, his rocket development center transferred from the Army to the newly established NASA and received a mandate to build the giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon.
The first stage of a Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket lands at Landing Zone 1, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, during Falcon 9 Flight 20 at 01:38 UTC on December 22, 2015 (8:38pm December 21 EST). This was the first successful ground landing of a first stage that was used to launch an orbital payload. The payload it launched, eleven Orbcomm G2 satellites, were successfully placed in orbit, its orbital insertion occurring at the same time as the first stage's landing.